"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.

Space Travel

One of the most daunting aspects of making science fictional aspirations real is the vast distances--and nearly insurmountable obstacles--between interesting space objects. Thank goodness for the fertile imaginations of sf writers, who can conquer all.
Generational starships have been a staple of science fiction, from crazy metal rockets to hollowed out asteroids. Wormholes and space-bending tubes are always popular with the technology conquers all crowd. Even better; faster than light travel - which may be more honestly classified as fantasy than science fiction proper.
Whatever the taxonomy, space is truly the final frontier, or the next frontier anyway. It's a great setting for some good old-fashioned storytelling.

Lars Caron had only taken over as mission commander because Pete Boardman had died. We were the most scanned, checked, and examined group of human beings in history--after all, on the first mission to Mars, you don't want someone falling ill or freaking out on the way--and Pete had checked out clearer than any of us. Then, seven days before departure, he went and died. The autopsy said his heart gave out, but I knew, from speaking to the doctors, that they could not find anything wrong with him. Dead, he presented as perfect a physical specimen as he had when alive. Me, I think he collapsed under the burden of hope that was placed upon him; mission commander, new world, new beginning. So, I grant Lars Caron had some big shoes to fill. But three months into the voyage, we were all getting thoroughly sick of the chip on his shoulder, the unspoken assumption that we had caused every problem laid in front of him. Space is like that: stuff happens. So, the slight sigh and the lowering of his head when he saw me approaching came as no surprise.
"Now what's wrong?" he asked.

They tell you not to wear the uniform in public these days. Folks don't like to be reminded of the war. Not long ago, things were looking grim. Defense exercises lit up the night sky every other week. The skirmishes drew nearer to home with every engagement. Doomsayers were out in force everywhere you looked, screaming about imminent invasion. Things are different now. The enemy is on the run. We're winning. But the war has shaken the public's sense of security, maybe for good.
I feel the eyes on me as the hostess leads me to my table. I'm used to it. Half of them are regulars, but they still gawk like they're surprised to see me. The war had just begun when I first started coming here. People used to stare back then too, but the expressions were different. They didn't turn their heads when I looked. They smiled. Some of them would even shake my hand and thank me for my service. That doesn't happen anymore.

My gut says that stepping out into hyperspace would be the same as suicide, but I've lost my hold on what that might mean.
Thinking is hard inside the ship. My brain chemistry is not what it once was. Chemistry is not what it once was.

It was only an affair because he was the captain and Maria was a cadet. If they had been the same rank it might just be a mistake. The other cadets will probably call her a slut now. She hides in her room and the computer pours her a cup of tea. She looks out her window at the earth, spinning. Spinning.
She dreams. The concrete basement of her parent's home has flooded, and the racks of their old clothes have fallen under the water. Wires fall from the ceiling and the electricity skitters across the surface like angry white spiders. There was no way to fix this. No way. Everything was ruined. She dreams she is bleeding into the secret caverns of herself.

When she first left, they gave me her feed out of kindness. A thin solace for a lonely child, but one they didn't mind. After all, there was little enough for their enemies to do even if they could gain access to the feed; it was space, vast, unknowable, and her ship more or less unlocatable. She didn't know, or if she did she never tried to use it to communicate with me.
Instead I got status updates, banter. It didn't really matter what she was saying; sometimes I would turn it on while I was sleeping and let the low murmur of my mother's voice put me to sleep like it did when she was home, sitting at the kitchen table working late into the night. Sometimes the feed was silent, if she was asleep, but as she got farther away silences stretched between even the simplest bits of dialogue. The algorithms kept words together admirably, but even so, eventually, I would have to wait hours, days, weeks before hearing the punch line to the joke or the solution to a problem.

Before we all boarded, they told us that it would be several years before we got wherever we were going. Wherever we were supposed to start all over after frying this planet to a crisp.
We were going to be in cryo-sleep, they said. So, there was nothing to worry about. It would feel like taking a nap. Sure, we'd feel a bit groggy on the other side, but no worse than we would after a couple hours on the couch. So we boarded and thought of ourselves as intrepid.

The boys lay on their backs side by side staring up through the open roof of the abandoned building. Dylan clutched Meek's hand in anticipation as the ground shook and a roar filled the air. Tiny pebbles danced up from the ground around them and dust ran like water off the crumbling walls.
"Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five," Dylan whispered, "four… three… two… one."

You feel hungry," Care told Makato. The food tray in front of him contained pureed carrots, boiled spinach, and protein cubes. Care had been made with placid eyes, a doll-like nose and mouth, and straight brown hair. Makato looked at the front of his belly, and it grumbled.
Later she wheeled Makato through a corridor with windows opening onto a park. People in tracksuits or hospital gowns, accompanied by those dressed in white like Care, were on the lawn, none of them moving. She let Makato look out the window for a while, but she didn't say anything. They went to a room floored by multi-colored rubber tiles. People in wheelchairs sat at tables with building blocks or other toys on them.

I miss Christmas. Now, in the black emptiness of space, we float in a ship with no chimney to slide down, and our ancestral mythologies are obsolete. We don't preserve Earthling traditions for our children, the first ship-born generation. Somehow, skipping Christmas is harder than letting go of the saints I prayed to all my Earth-bound life. Xan, my daughter, learns about them in school along with the Greco-Roman pantheon and the Maya priesthood. Xan, whose name I chose because it sounded like something from the science fiction magazines my grandpa kept in his basement, doesn't pray for intercession or write letters to Santa.
We tried getting rid of the months as well, unmooring ourselves from the meaningless 365-day year. We wanted to be free of our Earth lives, to be new creatures, space creatures, creatures of darkness and stars. Somehow, though, being lost in time was more frightening than losing ourselves in the vast geography of space. We finally kept the year and its old-fashioned months, so tonight is December twenty-fourth. Christmas Eve, I can't help thinking.

***Editor's Note: Be forewarned: the imagery may be unsettling, some language would not fit at an elegant tea.***
With a fine bone knife I make my incision, cutting back the sticky membrane of Our Tjeng's hull. I slip my hand inside and carefully widen the tear until it's big enough for me to step through. Our Tjeng has blessed Kae and me with gills to breathe within his walls. The viscous liquid is clear and burns my eyes, tart and slick on my tongue.

Jandara's famed purple-red plains swelled in the antiquated pleasure cruiser's windscreen as the ship lurched downward. The explosion that killed Seema's husband, Arun, had damaged the steering mechanisms of his beloved antique, and Seema fought the craft as shudders wracked it. Vibrations from the steering gears tingled, throbbed, and finally shook her arms. In the passenger compartment, Natesha, her seven-year-old daughter, wailed, echoing Seema's fear: Without Arun, I cannot survive.
The ship's belly bumped the ground, rose up, and dove hard. Tearing metal shrieked louder than Natesha. Seema buffeted in her restraints as a series of booms shook what remained of the ship. Then it settled, hissing, to the ground.

"Are you ready, Sam?" Uncle Glen whispered, stubble strewn cheeks screwing up into a smile, gleaming in the moonlight.
In my parents' backyard, wedged between the trees, sat Uncle Glen's airship--a hulking thing with a sleek metal chassis, overhung by a huge canvas balloon that blotted out the stars.

I stood on the deck of the ship and watched as my planet fell dark, receding into the distance.
"This is certainly the long way 'round," the ship whispered in my ear. "We have stations on both sides--you could have stepped right through. We could have folded you all the way."

The flickering light of the television cast Henry's shadow across the darkened room, and across me. Through the speakers a steady voice called time to t minus zero. The rockets fired. Henry gasped, though he didn't move. He was too close, as always, sitting cross-legged on the floor not two feet from the screen. Huge sheets of ice cracked, and fell from the scaffolding and fuel tanks, vaporizing in the blanket of smoke and fire blooming out from the launch site.
"Buddy," I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking, "come sit with dad on the couch."

In the shadow of SciCorp's Public Relations building, Kai leaned on his cane and waited for the press conference to end. A sea of reporters separated him from his daughter Suukyi, standing proudly on a podium with the other twelve colonists.
Twelve brilliant, highly trained, and fertile Eves; earth's Adams would be represented on the colony ship by a sperm bank.

The Rocketeer leans against the chrome bar, nursing a drink. She has a few choices of scenery--bad choices, in her opinion. Like always, the Rocketeer picks the best of the worst; the view out the window of the space station orbiting Mars. She looks down at the red surface polka-dotted with rockets, shiny silver spears pointing back at her, at the station, at the stars beyond. Just a quick jump down, then into a rocket, and back out into the Black again.
And none of these bucks taking up the rest of the bar know what they're in for, she thinks.

Jump flash, blinding but brief. Alpha Centauri A swims into view. It takes only a few minutes after our emergence into realspace for the receiver to align itself with Earth. A long burst of static roars, fades. A voice mutters indistinctly, distorted as if bubbling up from deep under water, then suddenly rings out in shrill clarity.
"… and this so-called Daedalus drive is not only a scientific impossibility, but a perfect example of misappropriated resources."

"Fifty-Nine, baby! Fifty-Nine!" Ted chortled, chipping a chunk of rock off Fenrir's surface and dumping it into the sample bag clipped to the hip of his spacesuit.
He looked up at Saturn hanging overhead and flashed two fingers. Two moons to go. He was that close. He deactivated his ground anchor and stepped his aging, creaky bones towards the boxy tangle that was his ship.

Captain Markus Halsey stared in dismay at the dense, careening field of asteroids on the display screen. His Chief Scientist, Obu sub-Abu, shook his head. "They're smacking into each other constantly. Look at how close they are!"
The Captain frowned and nodded. "All moving, and only a few hundred meters between each one. How does a field like this come into existence?"

My best friend LaToya was utterly fearless. In middle school she could jump farther than any kid. We'd compete for hours after school on the playground, waiting for our dads to pick us up, she in her green-soled Nikes and me in my Reeboks, digging our heels into gravel as we counted down together: "Three--two--one--go!" Then a cloud of dust. We raced three steps and launched heels-first into the sand, ploughing long ditches, stretching our gangly adolescent legs to hit the farthest mark. LaToya usually won.
"Best of three," I'd say, and then amend it: "Best of five?"

The hungry tiger slinks round and round the space shuttle walls, stuck to its centrifugal treadmill. Perhaps it knows I am trying to help, but I doubt it. I've lacked the courage to leave the cockpit since we left Earth, but that is all about to end, because our destination is still two weeks out, and the tiger has got nothing left to eat. I've got to feed it something. Otherwise this will be one long exercise in futility.
At 82 kilograms, the tiger is just an adolescent. Its pelt alternates spotted burnt orange with black stripes, like the tiger tried out being a cheetah before settling on this nature. It's a Bali tiger, a rare creature, so rare nobody has seen one alive since 1963. I am the only one on Earth who knows it yet lives.

It took tens of thousands of engineers ten million man-hours and over a trillion dollars spread over the course of ten years. There had been political sacrifice, financial sacrifice, even marital sacrifice. Five people died, including a mother, a teacher, and a grandfather of twenty-five. Perhaps, by diverting the same resources, we could have finished the war in Afghanistan twenty years ago. But at last, and not without luck, a man stood atop Olympus Mons.
To be that man required years of study in physics, math, chemistry, biology, geology, and languages; including English, Russian, Chinese, and C++. At minimum. It required the eyes of an eagle, the muscles of a Navy SEAL, and the brain of Deep Blue. No TV, no hobbies, no girlfriend, no family. Just blood, sweat, tears, and neurons to live the dream of every bright young male since 1957. Only the brightest, most athletic, most determined polyglot autodidactic polymathic genii could even enter the competition against one thousand equally infallible candidates from every continent.

In zero gravity he played a game with my wedding ring, throwing it at my finger and seeking to snare it, me trying to catch it on my outstretched finger. A game of horseshoes and hearts, he said, and we laughed.
How like the ring we were. Our ship was drifting through the stars, (A ring drifting towards another home,) passing billions of stars. When I first came on board, I knew that I would need a husband, a father for the children we would populate our new home with, and so amongst the passengers he and I drifted towards each other.

"Now you stop it," snapped the sister. "You sit there and you smile and you tell him you miss him, damn you. Space exploration is a hard job, and one we should be proud of. It's not his fault this seems so often to us."
The camera came on. The warble of great distance and stranger forces, too, played with the image. The man it showed was quite old, and dressed in a uniform from decades ago. "...Sally?" he said hesitantly.

We deployed on February 14, Saint Valentine's Day, named for the saint who performed forbidden marriages. I stood in line next to a guy named Wallace Ault. Around us was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, a lot of people sobbing on each other's necks.
Wallace and I weren't falling apart. He had a girl, a nice lean thing with good legs in a swirling brown knee-length skirt. She kissed him goodbye real quick and ran. I figured maybe they were secretly married themselves.

Fleet Commander Yazle picked her way through the debris of a destroyed city on the planet Unlivil. Beside her walked the High Grasper, the leader of the largest hive on the planet. Commander Yazle wondered why she had been invited to go on this perambulation with the pale, octopus-like being. She had expected hatred, possibly a murder attempt; not grateful politeness.
The High Grasper flashed three tentacles at a small winged scavenger, which took flight. The High Grasper picked up the mostly eaten carcass of a hexipod and placed it in a pouch.

"My job as a father, Jalel," he told me one morning, "is to leave you better off than I was."
It was a cold morning. On this planet, called Apella, the winters lasted years. Frost clung to some of the heartiest vegetation ever studied, and in their shadows, small animals sent up puffs of white dust in their quest for buried food.

The year EarthFed discovered hyperspace sickness was the year Jace McCallister's father never came home from outer space. They brought him back Earthside wrapped up in cotton and gauze so he wouldn't hurt himself, but his mind was still out there, caught in that strange between-place that nobody really understood, but into which spacegoers were expected to fling themselves so they could traverse the otherwise non-traversable distances between solar systems. No one knew how to treat him; no one knew why the jump had affected him that way in the first place.
Jace was six. She was too little to understand why Daddy had gone out into the black, or why she couldn't visit him in the hospital now that he'd returned. She didn't understand that he hadn't returned at all. Not really.

We get the love lines tattooed on our wrists on our one-year anniversary. Twelve celestial orbits of the moon. 365 rotations of the Earth. 3.154e+7 seconds since we met in the biography aisle of the quaint little bookstore on Third Street, which smells like toffee and dust. Since that serendipitous moment when you flitted around the corner and I lost my balance on that wobbly stool and somehow gravity or fate or some force higher than either drew us together, colliding like objects in space.
The guy at the guitar shop where you obsessively buy strings--a brand-new pack on the first of the month--knows a good place to get the lines done. It's near my training base, and the artist gets his ink from a meteor that crashed in the desert some twenty years ago. He's one of the best, his lines the most accurate. They glimmer silver, like some mystical mood ring when your love for a person is strong and healthy but fade out of existence when it dies.

This is Tomorrow speaking. The voice came from the Eleven O' Thirty radio. The left bar flashed painting the storage room a green color. Are you listening?
I turned the dial two clicks to the right. You are me from the future, right?

We're falling fast through the atmosphere, what's left of the station shaking violently as it breaks apart.
"We have to get to the escape pods," Natayla screams at me. I can barely hear her over the roar around us, but I can read the words on her lips as fear dances wild in her eyes. "Now!" she screams, shaking me.

Day OneAfter the men in dark sunglasses ushered Djuna outside, spring's chill chased her up the steps into the bus's welcome heat. She wavered on the last step, suitcase in front of her like a wall, thinking, "My fiftieth spring on Earth, can I really leave that?" Someone pushed at her and she went in.

Stardate 2025:325. We touch down on Mars. Flesh-colored dust settles around the capsule as the creaking, cooling fuselage ticks down to silence. Your face is pale inside the helmet; your hand grips the armrest between us. I think of your fingernails digging into my back, a shock of pain-pleasure distantly penetrating a mind preoccupied with release. The window onto this world is so small, yet the vista is endless. I breathe into my helmet until the visor fogs.

Our paranoia is infinite today. And not without reason. We have just endured a journey to and from Mars orbit in full view of the world. Areas of the ship that were supposed to be off-limits were not. Every bowel movement, every wet dream and dry heave, a veritable sampler of trysts--it has all been broadcast, sprinkled across the globe like so much Hollywood glitter. The ultimate Reality Show, with our crew of six as unaware actors.
Jimmy found the first pinhole camera. He brought it to me, pinched between his fingers like an insect with overlong legs. A frown fixed on his blocky face. His blue eyes blinked and blinked again.

Two months after the last broken transmission from Earth, somewhere in the unexplored dark, we found a voice.
At first we thought it was a mass hallucination. We'd been alone in space too long. Back home, we'd be treated for space sickness and starlust, our brains scanned and studied for signs that our grey matter had deteriorated in the vacuum. We'd be swaddled in hospitals, kept barefoot and away from the night sky until we stopped dreaming of plumed nebulas and stopped thinking we could hear the music of the spheres in C minor.

Jerry sits in his favorite chair--the one with the red, plastic back. He says the others just don't feel right. His eyes dart around the room with boyish wonder, but they're a man's eyes, milky with cataracts, edged with wrinkles. He looks at the black and white pictures on the wall depicting historic events and gives me the date (down to the time of day in some cases) for everything from the Kennedy assassination to the shooting at Columbine.
"Jerry, how do you feel today?" I ask, tapping my pen. Every session starts with a similar line of questioning; Jerry likes the routine. "Do you know how you feel?"

The one thing they all agree about is that I'm insane. They probably warned you about that before they brought you in here. Did they also tell you I used to be the navigator? Thirty years. Never a mark against my record. At least, not until I told them what I'd found.
Sit up here on my bunk and I'll tell you about it. Come on, they won't let you leave until your time's up, you know. I won't bite if you won't. I know, cheering up duty is no fun. I had to do it when I was a kid. I hated it too. There you go, settle down now and pretend to listen. I'll pretend you're cheering me up.

Most people were unsettled by the journey past the dead to the ship's forward viewing dome. Brad didn't mind as it allowed him solitude. He floated through the zero gravity of the dimly lit, quarter-mile-long corridor of the necropolis, pulling himself along the rungs between the rows of thousands of white sarcophagi encircling him on all sides, the blank faces of their occupants just barely visible through small windows. In four days, he'd be joining them.
Right before he reached the viewing dome, the lights in the necropolis brightened suddenly. In the distance, the entry door clicked open. Brad heard muffled voices as a four-person recovery crew entered. He floated for a few minutes as he watched them pull themselves forward and detach a sarcophagus. With two people on either side, they carefully floated back to the open door. The door shut with another click, and the lights dimmed.

They were the last rats on the ship, but the ship was not sinking. Its propulsion units were self-maintaining, self-repairing. The best-designed part of the vessel, the proton scoops and energy converters would keep the ship going and going, even if every other system failed.
Ages ago, they'd had a captain, and prior to that a different one, and before that another. They agreed on that much. The accounts of what had happened to the last captain varied from tribe to tribe. The Hydroponics claimed that a message had been received from home just before the comms died; the message had taken a long time to arrive, and when the last captain decoded it, she killed herself. But everybody knew the Hydros were heretics. The Med-U's said the last captain had died during an epidemic, which the Med-U's had barely been able to bring under control before everyone perished. They were such self-aggrandizers, those Med-U's.

I was always the first to fall asleep.
Sometimes she'd have to lay awake with me for hours. Stroking my hair. Rubbing my temples. Reading to me from old books we'd find in stores that smelled of leather and dust. Or singing to me in whispers. Her breath a gentle, sweet current on my ear. Quieting my stubborn head.

It was two weeks until the ship landed back on Earth, and Trisha figured that meant now or never. She had to tell Jazz how she felt. Because once they reached Earth, it'd all be different. Instead of being two of a half dozen kids, they'd be two of millions. It wouldn't matter anymore that Trisha could put a space suit on in under two minutes, because the Earth teens would know how to drive, play guitar, and swim. The sort of things Trisha had only seen in movies. Once Jazz met people like that, ze wouldn't have time for Trisha.
So she had to act fast. It was, you could even say, an emergency. Trisha was good at emergencies; she'd even been safety officer for two years at Mars High. (Which was also Mars Middle, and Mars Elementary. With six kids, one room really did the trick.) She knew how to stay calm, put on her spacesuit, and proceed to the nearest shuttle.

"Every tree is secretly a rocketship." The old man's voice was raspy and wobbly, like a drunk wearing corduroy. "They're just waiting for the celeshul alignment to blast off."
I don't usually engage with the crazies, but my train was delayed and there was no one else to talk to on the empty, late-night platform. I squatted down in front of him, put a crumpled dollar bill in his cup. "What about turning carbon dioxide into oxygen?"

My world is a pair of photographs. They stand atop a nightstand at my bedside, encased in acrylic frames.
A young woman in an orange jumpsuit smiles from one of the photos. She wears a nametag, but I can't make out what it says, not even when I squint. I am pretty sure that she's me.

Her expression tells you everything even before she speaks, and your world comes undone.
Then she confirms it: she tells you that her mission is a go. She is so excited, her face is radiant with possibility, and her eyes sparkle with the light of distant stars. You manage to smile, and it is the hardest thing you've ever had to endure.

"Just wait," she said. "This will be the best part."
A small bar in Cleveland, somewhere my memory only vaguely recalls after all this time. It wasn't the bar I was looking at. It was her smile, a smile like a supernova, spectacular, blinding, beautiful, and threatening to collapse my world into nothingness.

I thought I was somebody: somebody in Orangeville, 1984. But I wasn't. I was nobody. I wasn't anybody at all until Trick walked through the cafeteria doors: black hair an electric storm of back-combed annihilation, lashes dripping with mascara, cherry lipstick dark with rot, shimmering turquoise shirt, popped collar pinned at the throat by a stab of gold, hounds tooth print pants, red Docs.
The hubbub drained away and Craig Robb said: "What the hell are you?"

The flight attendant speaks as though he will win an Olympic medal if he finishes this safety speech in record time.
"Today's interstellar flight to the Taurean cluster will take approximately seventy years external-time, racking up six hours on your biological clocks. To avoid unnecessary amputations, please keep all hands, feet, and other protuberances within the boundaries of your personal cryogenics chamber.

Mark hangs up his apron. He strides past Shelly and helps one of the automatic doors open with a shove. Shelly follows to the courtyard of the spaceport.
Mark sits on a bench beneath a lighted sign that says “Mark and Shelly’s Pizza.” There is a big red slash through Shelly’s name. Shelly stands across from him and draws on her cigarette like she has been drowning without it. Still lighting them off each other, Mark notices, but she looks good, hasn’t aged a day.

Wise Ones, see here in front of you Girl Who Asks Too Much. Such a name does not cause pride to the Folk of the Egg. Dare not speak to her, or she will ask of you all the day long.
Why are some plants food for the Folk and some plants death?

Two packs of balloons, pink and blue. Ellen knows Rick's favorite color is green so she avoids it on purpose. Red plastic cups, white napkins, a bag of lime-flavored tortilla chips, and store-bought salsa. This is what she brings every year for the celebration, which she privately calls Man on the Moon Day.
She drives the two hours to Grass Valley with Sarah sitting in the back playing with her action figures. "Pow pow," goes the bad guy. "Zoom zoom," goes the good guy, dodging out of the way. "I'll never give up," the bad guy declaims in a fake British accent.

When we took to the stars, we knew we had excelled beyond the humans who had come before us. The cowherds and the fishermen, the politicians and the queens. Humans whose kingdoms--be they confined within an embroidery hoop, or a stretch of land, or a continent--shared a commonality. They were all ultimately worthless, fettered to an insignificant planet named after dirt, with--ironically--far too much ocean.
But we escaped into the deep like a virus into a network, and our kingdom was called "all."

Coming back to Earth isn't anything like he thought it would be. He's not entirely sure what he expected; he doesn't anticipate that the air will be as magnificent as it is, for one.
Spring now and this city by the lake explodes with allergens: pollen, seeds, leaves, and petals. Normally, his body would puff up in response: running nose, watering eyes, a sinus that has forgotten how to move air. He breathes deep, uncomplicated droughts of the pollen-saturated air; he tastes the distant snowdrops and daffodils and the strands of saffron in the crocus--crocin, diester, disaccharide gentiobiose!--he can speak these words, he can break each down and how it applies to the aroma, the flavor, but he cannot tell anyone why it matters. He breathes so deep his sinus is coated golden, his lungs are burnished gold; he should expel the color for days, he does not. He keeps it inside.

The spaceship Calliope breathes without pause, inhaling through mouths on the floor and exhaling from mouths overhead. Seaweed streamers on the ceiling vents wave in the continuous sigh. Lying in my bunk, eyes closed, the humming, breathing, great bear of a ship holds me close in warm embrace, its cave spread all around, black and vast and cold.
I miss Earth--how could I not?--but I miss Mother, too. Her face fades. How did the corners of her eyes wrinkle when she smiled? What color was her favorite blouse? How did she sound when she sang at her table working on what... a jigsaw puzzle, a game of solitaire, a paint-by-numbers picture?

You laughed when you scooped up something from the beach. You brushed off the sand, then offered it in cupped hands. A rock, perfectly heart-shaped--except for a chip on the left side that gave it a lopsided appearance, just like your smile. Here's my heart, you said. It'd been three weeks, four days, seven and a half hours since we met. A lifetime, a second, forever. I took your heart. You pulled me into your arms, fiercely tender. The waves crashed in an iridescent green sheet, rushing to coat our feet with icy froth. And I drowned in the deep ocean blue of your eyes.

Greetings from Earth? Greetings from Earth?! You've got some nerve to come up here after--how many millennia?--and stand there next to that slop bucket you call a ship and talk about greetings from Earth. Like you invented warp drive! Ooh, everybody look at the big explorer! Big explorer, my finger. You should be ashamed of yourself.
We have been so worried about you, you don't even know. When we dropped you off in that little backwater we never dreamed how many centuries would pass before you condescended to contact us. Yes, yes, we know. You had to get your bearings... find yourselves... clear your collective heads or whatever. It happens. It also happens that species grow up and think of someone besides themselves. We left you pyramids! Stonehenge! Easter Island! You could have phoned home any time but you had to do it your way with radio. Radio! I don't mind telling you, we could hardly show our faces outside the supercluster after that embarrassment. Your mother stopped going to bridge club, even.

Thomas stared at the cards in his hand. He bit his lower lip and worried it between his teeth as he eyed the pile of black rock that lay halfway between himself and his opponent.
"Dammit boy, you in or not?" Drawled the old man.

Fermi's Paradox proposes that, if aliens exist, after billions of years of evolution throughout the Universe, conquering species should have spread from star to star to the point of saturation, leaving ample evidence for us to find, yet there is none.
36 years, 7 months, and 10 days into the first manned voyage to Alpha Centauri B with another 20 years to go, I can confirm with confidence that Enrico Fermi was a smug idiot.

When I was little, I never thought about where the sweets came from. Daddy would leave me on board with a packet of sugary delights while he, Jeb, and Callum left for work. Sometimes they'd only be moments, sometimes hours, sometimes they'd come back with injuries. We always departed in a hurry. But I still had the flavors of fruits and spices and fizz on my tongue. I knew they were precious, and I was lucky to have a daddy who got them for me. Once they came in a red velvet pouch with another girl's name embroidered on it in silver thread. I was sad he'd got me the wrong one; the pouch was so pretty. But my name was unusual and tricky to find.
I knew luxuries were rare even though I never went without. When we docked at Zircon Station, everyone would "ooh" and "aah" over the treasures Daddy's crew brought home. Fine-spun fabrics, feather cushions, glassware, jewelry, and, of course, sugar. He'd sell cut-price to the station's traders and save the essentials for us. It wasn't until I got older that I noticed he took nothing to trade in return.

Dear Melanie,
I should tell you this in words or at least hand-deliver this letter, but I'm so afraid of your reaction that I'm hiding behind the inter-arcology postal service. Once the envelope is in the drop-box, it will be out of my hands, I'll have no way to lose my nerve and take the letter back. I know it's unfair of me to burden you with this, so close to the date of your shuttle launch, mere days before the mission that you've dreamed of for so many years.

It stared back at me like a cataract, blue and bloated, the black canvas of space all around it. Half illuminated by the nearest star, I followed the line between light and dark with my eyes, staring at the face of dusk. Or dawn. I didn't know which way the planet rotated. For my home, I was woefully ignorant of its orbitology. I could describe the orbital elements of every planet in every system in the galaxy, but I did not know my own.
I rubbed the back of my hand to try and stop it from shaking. It didn't work. It never worked.

Published on Nov 14, 2012

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